I haven't had a personal computer for awhile now and I just came into a decent laptop that will run decent for the games I missed out on over the years. I'm having a itch for some RTS and Space Games since these are the White Buffalo's of the console world.

Is it too late to StarCraft 2?

....or any other suggestions?

I've been looking at Endless Space on Steam or the X series and FTL; games of this nature. What have I missed?

It's never too late for some Starcraft. The second expansion (Legacy of the Void) is likely to be out before the year's end, so now would be a good time to jump in.

Don't forget that there is a free Starter Edition of StarCraft 2 available, as there is with all Blizzard games. That way you can check it out to see how it will run on your laptop before buying. If you are going to buy it, check Amazon - it's currently less than half the price that Blizzard is charging directly. Under $20 for both expansions.

http://www.amazon.com/Starcraft-II-Battle-Chest-PC-Mac/dp/B00PV2S6EE/ref=sr_1_1?s=videogames&ie=UTF8&qid=1443689183

The question has been answered conclusively above but yeah, grab the free starter edition now and LotV will be out very soon and will have a good player base online!

If you want an RTS that's more in the C&C vein try out Grey Goo . I really liked the campaign and they put out a mission pack for free a while ago.

The above link is definitely only for the base game and HotS, Legacy of the Void isn't out yet, but it will be soonish. So yes, it's not too late brother, go for it.

As for those other games, Endless Space is kinda like more in depth Civilisation but in space, X is a space flight sim whatever, and FTL is a rogue-like of sorts, so whilst they're all spacey, they're all completely different. FTL and Endless Space are good games, the most recent X was a broken mess but is supposedly ok now, X3 is supposed to be really good.

I've heard some good things about Homeworld remastered

SC2 has the best RTS campaigns ever pretty much so don't think those will get old any time soon; in general RTS is not the most common genre but you can always go back and play older stuff from GoG, most of that is still really good. Celtic Kings is the shit if you can find that somewhere.

Homeworld is secretly the best game ever made.

Anyway the SC2 campaigns are pretty great and a lot of hours of playing. Also now that the final part of SC2 is coming out (four years late) there's bound to be some warchest type thing for a reasonable price tag right?

Thanks for the responses! Totally forgot about Homeworld Remastered and Grey Goo. Ill add it to the list if stuff to pick up. D/L the Starcraft demo now and I picked up Endless Space just because I want to micro manage a Universal Empire.

@phoenix778m: Grey Goo and Homeworld: Remastered are fantastic. I love 'em. Petroglyph got Frank Klepacki back on for Grey Goo music, I really enjoyed the campaign and the cutscenes were very nice. I never played the original Homeworld games when they came out, but I've wanted to for a while and was very excited to hear about the Remaster, and it was pretty much exactly what I was hoping. There are some issues with it like formations; they tend to break up when entering combat instead of staying together as much as possible as in the originals, but overall it seems well done. They also added in a mission from, I think, Cataclysm, for free in an update. That was cool. And of course it comes with both HW1 and 2 classics as well as the Remasters.

I also really enjoy the X3 series. I haven't played Reunion (the first), but Terran Conflict (2nd) and Albion Prelude (3rd) are great 4X games. I mostly like like flying around space near frontline areas and watching ships fight each other. X: Rebirth was a buggy mess at launch but is a bit better now I think, though I haven't played it in a while (the soundtrack is still completely rad, though).

And FTL is a pretty fun game, one-shot per run. Ship management, making dudes run around to put out fires or fix holes from combat, deciding what to buy, etc etc.

@capum15: Grey Goo unfortunately is too intensive for my system. I've read up a lot on X: Series, there are so many different opinions of the X series. Terran Conflict seems to be the agreed upon go to. ?

@phoenix778m: If you had to choose one, I would also probably go with Terran Conflict. The games take a bit of getting used to, and I would advise you to read up on some stuff (there are tons of guides and such) or watch some videos to get the general feel of the games.

You can go crazy in-depth with building various space stations, having fleets of ships automatically doing things whether it's trading, escorting, patrolling, etc (of course, if you have the credits to do so), or you can just fly a single ship and do other things like more trading, bounty hunting, or follow one of a few different campaigns. For me, I just geared up whatever ship I could (maybe a couple other ships for support), and then went flying around border sectors trying to watch fights, and sometimes participating, depending on who was fighting.